“You’re going to see a lot of people that weren’t involved . . . before start to get involved,” he told the Thursday Morning Roundtable, a weekly civic forum run by University College at Syracuse University.

Questions from the audience focused on what police are doing to combat youth crime, gangs and gun violence. Fowler spoke at length about the lack of parental involvement in children’s lives and the need for new approaches to set them on a path to success.

Here are excerpts from his talk. A link to the video appears below. To hear the radio broadcast of Thursday Morning Roundtable, tune into WCNY-FM (91.3) at 8 tonight.

What’s going on in the city with the youth and that terrible killing?

There’s a huge social breach. We’re losing the battle long before these young people pick up this gun and are brought to the attention of the police. There’s something horribly wrong that goes on in a young person’s life .¤.¤. that makes them reach that point that they want to get involved in that type of activity to begin with. That’s one side of it.

The other side is that that activity gets and it deserves to get a lot of attention ... But ... in the city of Syracuse we have a lot of tremendous young people, bright, brilliant, intelligent young people .¤.¤. The young people that are involved in this life of violence is a small percentage of the great young people that we have in our city. So if you want to look for something to be optimistic about, a light at the end of the tunnel, there are a lot of great young people out there (who are) going to become productive members of society and our future leaders.

Chief Fowler at Thursday Morning Roundtable Part 1Chief Frank Fowler was the speaker at the Thursday Morning Roundtable, December 2, 2010. He answered questions from the audience addressing community involvement, protecting the downtown area, gangs and much more. Fowler talks about his upbringing and career. This is a three part series, 45 minutes total. This first part is 11:54 minutes long.

How many gang members are there in the city of Syracuse?

How many gang members, that’s a difficult question to (answer). In Onondaga County and in the city of Syracuse, right in the Public Safety Building, we’re very fortunate to have a crime analysis center, there’s only five in the state. ... We have a tremendous amount of gang intelligence and so we kind of have a very good idea of how many gangs there are. We have a very good idea of how many ...(are) actively involved in criminal activity. With each day somewhere in our neighborhoods, somewhere in our community, unfortunately, there’s a young person looking to round the corner, looking to elevate themselves in terms of their gang status. So when you ask me the number of gang members, that number changes each and every day. We have young people who are saying hey, I’ve had enough of this, this isn’t what I thought it would be and they get out. And then you have younger people joining. It’s very difficult to give you an exact number.

Would you do anything differently in the war on drugs? In terms of truancy in schools, could we do anything differently there to help alleviate the gang problem?

¦I worked eight and a half years, almost half of my law enforcement career in narcotics, in that entire eight and a half years I’ve spent working undercover. I would like to think that I’ve made probably more hand-to-hand drug transactions than any police officer out right now. So I know upfront, firsthand and real close about this drug problem that you speak of. We have new drugs that are coming into our community and they are absolutely destroying lives. I had a person tell me once .¤.¤. “Frank, calm down, drugs are a victimless crime.” Now that kind of lit a fuse on a stick of dynamite that day because I went on to point out to him that drugs aren’t a victimless crime, and I pointed out to him how many victims lay in the wake of people who are involved in drugs. That’s why some of these children that we talk about that are involved in violence and truancy and things of that nature. That’s why they’re involved in this stuff because they don’t have a chance from the beginning.

Crack cocaine has done something that at no other time period, no other thing in society has ever done. Crack cocaine is the only thing that has occurred in the history of our society that would cause a mother to walk away from her baby and when I was working undercover, I saw that over and over and over again. And the devastation of this family, where you would have the mother leave the child alone, take whatever food, whatever thing they saw of any type of value and go and sell that, sell her body, just for this drug. So these drugs are very, very dangerous.

But you have to understand the war on drugs. The war on drugs is fought at various levels, we’re on the front lines here locally in fighting this war on drugs. I don’t profess to know what the federal government is doing across the board, maybe they’re doing a lot of great things that I’m unaware of, so I really can’t speak to that. But somebody somewhere, somewhere along the way is kind of missing this thing because these drugs are still getting into our community. My special investigation guys, they’re knocking down doors every day conducting search warrants, and drugs are continuing to come into our community. It is a huge problem and it’s one of the big contributing factors to gang problems, to criminal activity because you have people that get hooked on the drugs and then you have the allure of the fast profits.

As far as truancy is concerned. Yeah, truancy is a big contributing factor to a lot of the criminal activity. It’s a direct correlation to some of the burglary investigations that we find ourselves involved in. Burglary is on the rise in our city. Our arrests are up and we find ourselves arresting more and more juveniles. You’re going to hear a story, if it hasn’t already broken, about a young man, a juvenile that was arrested for multiple burglaries and was just let right out of jail. And then the neighborhood is ... in an uproar because they were an integral part in assisting us in arresting this young man and he’s committing these burglaries while he should be in school. Now I’m not blaming the school system for this, that young man should have some adults that’s responsible for him, and I’d like to think that they play a role in the fact that he’s not in school.

Are you getting more cooperation in communities where there is violence? If so, can we look at that on a grander scale and hope that down the road if more communities take responsibility and band together, could that have an impact on the amount of drug traffic and violence?

I’ve heard on the news a couple of times and I’ve heard people who don’t have a clue say, police and community relations and if the police had a better relationship with the community. That’s garbage. Our relationship with the community is improving and is improving greatly and it’s gonna continue to improve because you know why? That’s extremely important to me ... We are getting people to come forward. We wouldn’t be able to solve the type of crimes at the rate that we’re solving them without our community.

And yes, you’re right on the money with community involvement because when a community stands up and demonstrate that they’re not going to tolerate lawless acts within their own communities and that they’re going to call the police, you’re going to reach up and pick the phone up and call their neighbors, they’re going to alert people, they are going to educate people, they’re going to become involved, that’s going to be a neighborhood that’s unattractive to the criminal element and we’re going to push this activity out and away and ultimately working together to solve this and making our neighborhoods better. That is, in fact, the answer.

You were interviewed after the death of that 20-month old child and you said something like, “Well, if this doesn’t change things, nothing will.” Is that a wish or an expectation?

It’s an expectation. ... I’m very optimistic about the city that I live in. ... I think that the majority of the people in our great city of Syracuse are just that, they’re great, great people and I think they’re just as tired of this stuff as anyone else is. And I think that from the death of this 20-month-old baby you’re going to see a lot of people that weren’t involved ... before start to get involved.

What should be done by people in this city to reduce the crime rate besides having a good police force?

Let’s start with the young people. ...For example, if a 15-year-old goes out and he smashes out your window in your house, right, you’re going to call the cops and say hey, this person smashed out my window. You’re going to go over and talk to the parents. You may say something to the 15-year-old but you’re going to go right to the parents. Why is that? You want your window fixed, the 15-year-old doesn’t have a job but their parents who are responsible for them, they have jobs. So you go right to the parents without hesitation ... because you know that the child’s behavior was wrong, it was reckless it may have even been criminal, but you know that there’s a social side connected to that too and the only way to get at that is through the parent because you want your window fixed and you don’t want it to happen again.

... Well, every other part of crime that involves a juvenile is just as much social as it is criminal. In fact, I’m willing to argue that only 20 percent of a 14-year-old committing a burglary is criminal. The act itself is criminal in nature but the fact that a 14-year-old has rationalized in his mind that he’s going to wake up at 2 o’clock in the morning go and crawl into somebody’s window and steal their property, something horribly wrong took place leading up to the actual act of burglary. And we don’t hold the parents, we’re not holding adults connected to these young people accountable for that.

And people who (defend) that by saying “Well, Frank, some people don’t know, or some people aren’t able to, their kids are out of control.”

I witnessed in the lobby of the public safety building one morning a mother. She had the pajama bottoms on and she had the scarf tied around her head and she had her son that was about three inches taller than her and she was berating him. ... She had just gotten him out of the youth division upstairs and her biggest issue was her son had inconvenienced her because she had to get out of bed and come down and get him out of the custody of the police. And boy, was she letting him have it. And I said to myself, that’s part of the answer right there. These adults connected to these kids need to be inconvenienced a little bit more.

We’re not inconveniencing them enough because, see, you take the juvenile, let’s go back to the 20 percent criminal part, right? Take the juvenile, commits a burglary, the police grab him, let’s assume that throughout the justice system everybody does their part and the young person is placed in some type of placement facility for young people. They’re going to counsel him, work with him, probably even make him get up and go to school every day, they’re going to try to turn him around. But what’s going to happen is at some point he’s going to be put right back in that same place where he was able to rationalize that behavior to begin with and then that vicious cycle is going to start all over again because everything else that came into that young person’s life is an exception. The norm is (what had) taken place in their household.

So I say to you, if we inconvenience the parents. If your child is involved in criminal activity and you bring him in and say OK, now that your child is involved in criminal activity, we’re going to do an assessment of your household. We want to find out how you all got to this point, not just your son, but you, your husband or whoever is connected to this person how you got to this point because, and then, if we did that, guess what we can also do? We can use social service agencies a little bit better, we can target specific problems. ... We’re not doing that and I think that’s where we’re kind of losing the battle with these young people.

If money was no object, how would you spend it on prevention?

...We’ve got to give young people a chance. ... Take three young people and you dress them the same, you look at them and they may all look the same. I use an analogy of sponges, you take three identical sponges and you fill one up with vegetable oil, one up with water, one up with gasoline and you stand from a distance and you look at those three sponges they all look alike. The only way you’re going to tell the difference between those sponges is that you put them under pressure. And when our children are put under pressure, you see exactly what’s inside of them and they’re put under pressure each and every day.

... They’re not all alike. They don’t come from good households, there’s a lot of adults that are surrounding these young people that are teaching them and displaying to them on a daily basis some very, very bad habits ...

So, if money was not an object, I would say we should consider not a boot camp but a military-style school where we send these young people to and we keep them there straight through high school because some parents are overwhelmed. And if the parents say, you know, I can’t do it, I’m failing here and I need some help with structure and discipline, the parent is able to bring their child to a place that’s going to provide them with structure, discipline and to educate them and give them a great chance, an equal opportunity to be successful in society and the child is going to learn values.

... You’re looking at a product of urban America. I grew up in a very impoverished, tough area of St. Louis, Missouri, and when people looked at me early on in my young life and said this guy here, he’s not gonna make it. ... I joined the Army. And when I joined the Army it was an interesting culture shock for me. But, that was the thing — structure, discipline, a sense of belonging, understanding my place not only in my own community but in my world and in my society. And I bought in. And I haven’t looked back since. But that’s just Frank Fowler, one person.

So when I say that type of school I have in mind my own path. If I can be standing here today before you all with four stars on my collar as your chief of police, there’s other young men out there in urban America someplace that can do the same exact thing that I can. But they just need a chance, they just need an opportunity.